Able One (24 page)

Jamil pushed his chair away from the table and looked for Zuri Coggins in the group clustered before the wall screens.

The Chinese are behind this! He was certain. The North Koreans are fronting for Beijing. We’re heading smack into a nuclear war.

U.S. Route 12, Bitterroot Mountains, Idaho

Charley Ingersoll had to make a decision. The van was stuck in the god-dratted snowbank on the shoulder of the road. The more he tried to pull out of the snow, the deeper his tires spun into the ruts they were making.

Martha was ashen-faced, barely keeping herself from sobbing. The kids seemed okay, but they were strangely quiet. Scared, Charley thought.

I’m scared too, he realized. Stuck here in the middle of infernal nowhere with the snow coming down harder than ever and the van running out of gas. Stupid phone doesn’t work and there hasn’t been a snowplow through here for God knows how long. Lord have mercy! We could freeze to death! He tried the radio. Nothing but hillbilly music or blaring rock that made him feel as if his eardrums were about to explode. No news. No weather reports.

“It’s ten minutes to two, Charley,” his wife said, her voice small, frightened. “They’ll have news and weather on the hour.”

Like that’s going to do us any good, Charley thought. But he didn’t say anything out loud. He sat and waited. The van was eerily silent. Only the soft purr of the engine and the moaning wind outside. The snow was coming down heavier than ever.

How long will the gas last? Charley asked himself. Once it runs out and the heater goes, we could all freeze to death.

“Can’t we go out and make a snowman?” Little Martha asked again.

“No!” Martha snapped. “Stay in here, where it’s warm.”

For how long? Charley wondered.

“Your headlines on the hour,” a man’s deep voice intoned over a blare of trumpets. “Surprise blizzard blankets the region with snow! Widespread electric outages reported! Network and cable television still out of service!” He sounded positively happy about it all. “And now the details.”

Charley listened in growing impatience as the voice told how television service had been out all day except for local stations. Come on with the weather, Charley prompted silently. Come on!

“A surprise autumn storm has struck the region with more than a foot of snow, and still more on the way.” The guy sounded overjoyed about it, Charley thought. “Snowplow crews have been struggling to keep the interstates open, but secondary roads have been officially closed to all but emergency traffic . . .”

“Secondary roads?” Martha asked. “Are we on a secondary road?”

Charley shook his head. “Damned if I know.”

Martha glared at his language. Charley was surprised at himself. He glanced back at the kids.

“I’m cold,” Little Martha said from the backseat.

“I’ll turn up the heat, dear,” said Martha. Charley saw that the heater was already on maximum.

Suddenly he heard himself say, “We passed a gas station a couple miles back.”

“But they couldn’t pump any gas,” his wife said.

“Yeah, but I think I saw a tow truck there. They could pull us out of this snowbank and siphon some gas into our tank.”

“But we don’t have their phone nu--” Martha stopped herself, realizing that their cell phone wasn’t working anyway.

“I’ll go back and get them,” Charley said.

Martha’s eyes popped. “Outside? In this blizzard?”

“It’s only a couple miles. I can make it.”

“Charley, no! Don’t!”

But he had made up his mind while he was speaking the words. Anything would be better than sitting here doing nothing. Even freezing out in the snow.

“Charley, please! Don’t leave us!”

As he reached for the door handle, Charley said, “I’ll be back in an hour or so. With a tow truck.” He tried to sound confident. He certainly didn’t feel it.

ABL-1: Beam Management Compartment

“Got it!” Monk said, grinning.

Leaning over his burly shoulder, Harry saw the return blip from the ranging laser on the readout screen of Delany’s console. Numbers rastered down the screen’s side. The laser was working fine and pinging the tanker plane with low-power invisible infrared pulses.

Harry grabbed the headset hooked to the console’s side and slapped it onto his head. Thumbing the intercom button on the console, he called, “Hartunian to the communications officer.”

“Comm here,” said O’Banion’s voice in the earphone.

“I’m piping our ranging laser’s data to you. Please confirm against your radar.”

“Will do, Mr. Hartunian.”

Monk looked up at Harry, his lopsided grin almost a smirk. “I told you I’d get it working. No sweat.”

Harry nodded absently. It was one thing to put the little laser together and make it work. It was another to make it work
right.
Using the tanker plane as a target was a good test, although the plane was practically in their laps and the real test would come when they had to get the range on a missile boosting from a hundred or more miles away. But if their laser results matched the plane’s regular radar--

“Mr. Hartunian,” said O’Banion.

“Yeah?”

“I’m sending our numbers down to you. They look good to me, sir.”

“Okay, okay.” Harry felt his hands trembling slightly as the radar numbers began to appear on Monk’s screen, alongside the numbers from their ranging laser.

“On the button!” Monk crowed. “Look at that!”

Harry saw that the numbers differed only on the fourth decimal place. Good enough, he thought. Good enough.

“You’re right, Monk,” he said, forcing a smile. “We’re in business.”

“Better tell that flygirl skipper, pal.”

“I will,” Harry said, straightening up. “After I check with Taki.”

Monk’s grin shrank as Harry left him and ducked through the hatch to the battle management station, where Nakamura sat peering intently at one of the four consoles.

Sliding into the chair beside her, Harry said, “Monk got the ranger working.”

“I can see that,” Taki said, tapping a lacquered fingernail against the console’s main screen.

“Is it good enough for you?” he asked.

Nakamura nodded, but Harry saw that her lips were pressed together tightly.

“Problem?”

She looked away from him for a moment, then turned back to the console and its array of screens. “Harry, I can’t do this. Not all by myself.”

“I know.”

As if she hadn’t heard him, she went on. “I mean, it’s one thing to run a test, just fire the COIL at a spot in the empty air. But now we’re going to try to hit real missiles? Come on, there’s supposed to be four people at these consoles. I’m only one person. I can’t do everything.”

“I’ll be beside you, Taki. I’ll be right here with you. We’ll do it together.”

Nakamura focused her dark eyes on Harry. He saw doubt in them. And he understood what was going on in her head. It all depends on her, Harry thought. Wally and Angel can fire the COIL. Monk can make the ranging laser work. But it’s Taki’s responsibility to run the sensors that acquire the infrared signature of the rocket exhaust plume, point the COIL at the target, and get off enough shots to take out the missile before its engines cut off and we lose the infrared signal from the plume.

“Taki,” he said softly, “what it takes four blue-suiters to do, the two of us can do.”

“You think so?”

“Sure. You’ll get an Annie Oakley medal for sharp-shooting.”

Her brows knit. “Annie Oakley? Who’s she?”

The tension broke and Harry laughed. “I’ll tell you all about her after this is over.”

As he got to his feet, Monk came through the hatch and passed through the compartment. “Kidney break,” Delany said.

The lens assembly! Harry thought. He’s going to wipe down the lens assembly! He watched Delany duck through the hatch, wondering what he should do.

“I’ve got to talk to the pilot,” he said to Nakamura, and followed Delany out of the compartment.

Instead of going upstairs to the flight deck, though, Harry watched Delany step into the lavatory, then he went into the galley, sat tensely at one of the bucket seats, and kept his eyes on the lav hatch.

Delany came out in less than a minute. He didn’t have time to do anything with the lens assembly, Harry thought. Hell, he didn’t even take the time to wash his hands!

But Harry entered the lavatory anyway, kneeled down, and opened the cabinet. The cartons of toilet paper were stacked just as he had left them. Taking the top few out, Harry saw the lens assembly still sitting behind them.

As he put the packages back Harry thought that so far he had proven nothing. As a detective he was a total flop.

ABL-1: Cockpit

“Message incoming from the Pentagon,” O’Banion reported. “I’m running it through decrypt now.”

“Let me see it as soon as decrypt’s finished,” Colonel Christopher said.

“Right.”

Lieutenant Sharmon’s softer voice sounded in her earphone. “We’re approaching North Korean territorial waters, Colonel.”

Karen Christopher frowned slightly. They had flown past the storm swirling across the Sea of Japan and were now over open water. Through the windscreen Christopher could see nothing but empty ocean, gray and rippled with waves. No sign of land.

“We’re twelve miles off the coast of Korea?”

“No, ma’am,” Sharmon replied. “The North Koreans claim territorial rights out to two hundred miles.”

“Two hundred? Is that legal?”

“I checked the regs, Colonel. Twelve miles is the international standard for territorial rights, but some countries claim exclusive economic rights out to two hundred. They don’t allow fishing boats or stuff like that.”

Colonel Christopher puzzled over that for a moment. “Better check with Washington and see what they recommend.”

“It’ll take awhile; communications are still all fuck ... er, all snarled up.”

The colonel nodded to herself as she thought, We need to get this bird as close to the shoreline as possible. When those gooks pop their missiles we’ve got to be close enough to nail them right away. Close enough to take more than one pop at them if we have to.

O’Banion came back on the intercom. “Colonel, Mr. Hartunian’s asking to talk to you.” “Where is he?”

“Down in the battle management compartment.”

She turned to Kaufman. “Obie, take over. Stay on this heading until we’re twenty miles off the coast. Holler if I’m not back by then.”

Kaufman looked resentful, as usual. But he said, “Twenty miles. Right.”

Colonel Christopher nodded at her navigator and communications officer as she went through the flight deck and down the ladder to the tiny niche between the beam control and battle management compartments. Hartunian was standing behind the Asian-American girl, the expression on his face somewhere between grim and determined.

“Any problems, Mr. Hartunian?” the colonel asked, barely loud enough to be heard over the rumble of the plane’s engines.

Hartunian gestured toward the galley as he said, “I think we’re ready, Colonel.”

“You think?” Christopher felt her brows knitting. She had wanted to make her tone light, not accusative. No sense making the nerd get sore at you, she told herself. But her words had come out as challenging, demanding.

Hartunian seemed not to notice as he stepped through the open hatchway and waited for her to enter the galley. Then he closed the hatch behind her, softly, as if he didn’t want anyone to hear it shut.

“Well?” Colonel Christopher said.

“The hardware’s in operating condition. We tested the ranging laser on the refueling plane and it’s working okay.”

“Good.”

With a shake of his head, Hartunian went on, “But I don’t know about the people. We’re just a skeleton crew. And one of us tried to sabotage the mission.”

“You still don’t know who.”

“No idea.”

Christopher thought it over for all of two seconds. Then she muttered, “Well, let’s hope it’s not some fanatic who’s willing to kill himself.” Then she added, “Or herself.”

Hartunian said, “I’ve been thinking about that. Whoever it was tried to screw up the mission in the least dangerous way possible. Knock out the ranging laser and we’d have to abort the test and turn back for home. But now that he knows this mission is for real...” His voice trailed off.

Christopher went to the coffee urn and poured herself a mug. “If you’re right, that means whoever it was sabotaged your laser when he--or she-- thought this flight was only a routine test.”

“Right,” Hartunian agreed. “Which means that whoever it is wanted to give Anson Aerospace a black eye. He’s not an enemy agent, he’s just a damned industrial spy, working for one of Anson’s competitors.”

The colonel stared at Hartunian for a long, silent moment. Then, “You think so?”

The engineer smiled bitterly. “Either that or we’re all dead.”

San Francisco: St. Francis Hotel

As he spoke earnestly into the telephone, the President hardly glanced at the magnificent view of the Golden Gate Bridge from the penthouse suite’s windows. It was raining out there anyway, a steady, gray, cold-looking rain.

Norman Foster sat on the luxurious Louis XIV sofa and ran a hand over his bald pate as he watched his friend and boss chatting away on the phone, charming one moment, intimidating the next. Moscow, Tokyo, NATO headquarters in Belgium: he’d been trying to get world leaders lined up with him despite the maddening slowness of the battered global communications system.

At last the President put the phone down. Before he could get out of his chair, Foster said, “The Air Force wants to send some F-15s to escort ABL-1.”

“A fighter escort?” the President. “Why do they want a fighter escort?”

Foster knew that they’d have to change into fresh suits before heading out to the Cow Palace. He glanced at his wristwatch before replying, “The laser plane’s a big four-engine 747. If the North Koreans or the Chinese try to intercept it, she’ll be a sitting duck.”

“This request came from NSA?”

“From the special situation team. They sent it through the Air Force, who passed it up to the Secretary of Defense,” Foster said.